The invention is a continuous-conveyance bulk-cargo ship unloader. It has a pickup at the bottom of an upright screw conveyor. The screw conveyor rotates around a vertical axis and relays a more or less horizontally free-flowing stream of bulk material to a sandwiched-belt conveyor accommodated in an elephant trunk.
A ship unloader is known from the still unpublished P 4 116 467. It has a pickup at the bottom in the form of a scooper head or bucket wheel. The pickup relays the material radially inward to a vertical conveyor, which can be a screw conveyor for example.
The screw conveyor comprises a preferably two-thread screw that fits snugly into a cylindrical housing. The screw rotates rapidly enough to fling the material that has penetrated between its threads against the inner surface of the housing. The friction between the material and the inner surface decreases the material's peripheral speed in relation to that of the screw, and the material is forced up against the screw's pitch.
The material arrives at an opening higher up in the housing. Since its centrifugal motion is no longer impeded by the housing's inner surface, the material will leave the conveyor in a free tangential trajectory and arrive in the intake of another perpendicular conveyor.